@Media Day Two and where we go from here

Day two was looking to be exactly what I was looking for from the whole experience of @Media2005. Doug Bowman kicked off with an in-depth presentation discussing the re-design of Blogger, from the processes to actual techniques used. There was a particularly great example of using CSS classes on the body tag to change the whole layout of a page without requiring any other changes to the markup. A transcription can be read on Joe Clark's site

Jeremy Keith was next up to demonstrate the unobtrusive use of Javascript without requiring event handlers in-line within your mark-up. This way of implementing your scripts means once again you can keep your mark-up clean and your behaviour layer separate from everything else.

After a great cup of gravy coffee Molly E. Holzschlag took to the stage to reveal some ways to revolutionise your workflow with tips on debugging and why hacks should be kept to the minimum. A transcription can be found on Joe Clark's site

Joe Clark delivered his second presentation this time putting forward an idea to create a secondary stylesheet which makes it easier for a partially-sighted user to zoom up the text on your site. I really enjoyed all of Joe's presentations; he has a great sense of humour. In fact, he reminds me of the doctor in Star Trek Voyager (sorry Joe), I could imagine him saying "Please state the nature of your accessibility emergency".

After a spot of lunch we went back to the auditorium for Derek Featherstone's talk on acessibility testing, in which he went into some detail on the current school of thought on what testing methods yield the best results.

Andy Clarke gave a very lively presentation regarding the creation of disneystore.co.uk using webstandards. Andy also went through his views on current techniques for developing with standards. A transcription can be found on Joe Clark's site. Andy was also the first speaker I've ever seen who screws up his notes as he goes, and I've seen plenty of speakers having been in the AV industry.

Lastly there was a panel (Andy Budd, Joe Clark, Doug Bowman, Molly E. Holzschlag) event hosted by Joe Clark Molly where the panel discussed hot topics, first up was discussion of semantics after which everyone who seemed to ask a question found it was directed to Joe. Towards the end the panel opened up the discussion to the floor.

Lastly we all headed off to Clinks Bar attached to the Novotel Hotel where Tim and I grabbed a couple of swift pints before heading home to our respective Mrs. My only regret was not staying longer to chat to some of the speakers and other attendees but that will have to be left to another time.

All in all @Media2005 was a resounding success, I came away feeling that I had genuinely learnt a few things from the speakers and hopefully I will get a chance to put them into practice very soon. The first day wasn't as interesting for me as the second but maybe that's something that can be addressed in future events. I suggested on the feedback form that they could maybe think about having two streams to the event next year one for people new to web standards and one for those that are already experienced.

Following @media I have a feeling that there's still a lot of work to do; I agree with a point that Andy Clarke made in that there's still a long way to go for web-standards to be used on the majority of sites. I am thinking that one thing I could do is to start a site that lists all the web-applications/scripts that have been created with web-standards in mind, this will assist the standards savvy developer in choosing which software he/she uses on their site. I can see that there are a lot of server-side developers out there that have no idea about standards and as a result there needs to be a site that does for server-side developers what CSS Zen Garden did for designers.